Dirk Heine

A Climate for Change Dirk Heine

Essay from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Economic Policy, , course: Harvard College China-India Development and Relations Symposium, New York 03-04/2007, 0 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: This essay presents a concept for international economic climate change mitigation after Kyoto. It tries and bridges the negotiation positions of the US, India and China to suggest -based on the moral philosophies of John Rawls- a system for mitigation that is not only cost-efficient but also equitable. Presented in Peking University and Harvard China-India Development and Relations Symposium where this work was selected for a 'Certificated of Merit' , abstract: One of the major vindications for the US not signing Kyoto is that the treaty does not contain any legally binding emission reduction targets for China and India, although these countries have become respectively the second and fifth biggest emitter of CO2. India and China -in return- claim that a path of development that would not harm the climate is too expensive for them; the West has to pay for a historical responsibility that stems from its past emissions, which brought about anthropogenic climate change in the first place. In this way the blame is passed from one nation to the other, and in the meantime all three countries keep on increasing their gross emissions. The essay identifies that part of the problem is the current perspective in intergovernmental emission reduction negotiation. All negotiation is about how much the global top-polluters agree to reduce their emissions. Kyoto left open to what value of CO2-equivalent countries ultimately have to reduce their emissions. Thus it was also not possible to tell how much India and China can increase their emissions. The essay rationalises how the exclusiveness of a top-down negotiation increases the cost of climate change mitigation in the US, as in China and India, by constricting the US-suggestion of international CO